Zingtree Tags: buttons

You guys are awesome! We’ve received a few suggestions from some of you recently to make Zingtree even more useful. These are now live.

Here’s what we heard:

“Increase the number of buttons per node”. Done. Is 30 buttons enough?

“Allow us to add merge variables to a node”. Done. You can now pass in merge values for the title, content, question or button text. For example, a software company wanted to pass in the latest version number into a troubleshooter tree, without having to change the tree each time. Mission accomplished by just adding a couple of parameters to the end of the URL.

Here’s a quick primer on adding merge variables:

Edit a node, and insert text like “#NAME#”, “#VERSION#’ anywhere into the node where you want to substitute a variable.

Pass the name of the variables, and their corresponding values, into the URL for hosting or deploying your tree. Separate the variables with a | character. Just add a string like this to the end of the Zingtree hosted URL or within the embed code:

&variables=NAME|VERSION&values=Joe+Smith|54.0

More information:

You can learn more about passing variables from the Share page for any tree.

We don’t live in a bubble. Our team is constantly looking for web sites that spent a lot of money (and time) to custom code something similar to our Zingtree interactive decision tree, and we’ve seen a different style of user interface that we like, and we think you might too. So we adopted it as an option, which we call the Panels style. It looks like this:

You can choose between the traditional Buttons style, or the new Panels style, when you deploy your tree. You can also try any of our Gallery trees in Panels or Buttons style.

In case you are new here, here’s how the Buttons style looks:

Plus, you can even use your own CSS to redefine the standard colors, fonts and spacing used in the Panels style – just go to the Settings for your tree. (You can also change the default preview style from this screen as well.)

Having action buttons on every node is an essential element of creating helpful Zingtrees. We call these persistent buttons. For example, you could have “Start Again” and “Search” buttons display with every node. These buttons can jump directly to any point in your tree.

Here’s an example from our “What to Wear” demo, with buttons for “Start Again”, “Working”, and “Playing”:

It’s easy to make Zingtree include persistent buttons by adding to the URL that Zingtree gives you. Here’s an example of a URL with three persistent buttons for the tree above: